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content gifts

The “Right” Gift

Follow on from “Gifts”

I was walking the dog yesterday and thinking over the post I’d just written and my gifts – and how content I was with my gifts now. Note “now”. I had many years when I wasn’t content with them and wanted something “better”. Like many of us I’d worked out a hierarchy of gifts and giftings, of things I should be doing, things that were godly and things that weren’t, things that were worthy and things that were a bit trivial.

I wonder how many of us, or is it just me, have amazing gifts and talents but are not using them because we are struggling to manifest some gift that just isn’t in us whether to please parents, or to be thought highly of, or because we think “just” smiling at someone isn’t really using our gifts.

Having done work in schools and with young people I see how they rate and value so much. I’ve done amazing writing projects with teens who were in lower sets and who saw themselves as “thick” to quote one teen. Ok so they weren’t grade A students but they had so many other gifts and talents.

Too often, I think, we rate gifts on how much we earn using them, how much other people give us credit for them, how much praise we get for them from those who are significant to us. When actually we should be looking at ourselves, be honest with what we love – because that is generally where our gifts lie and where they will blossom best. I don’t think a gift will flourish is we are trying to do it within something we don’t love.

I think, again, it comes back to that whole freedom thing. We can be fully free if we are using the gifts we were given, not the gifts we think we should have and that we know we are loved just as we are and don’t need to change to please others.

This I think is true freedom, where true peace and joy come from, and where we are without fear to fully walk the gifts we have and not try to be someone else. If we look back at The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe each of the children had different gifts and each had to use them to the full for the White Witch to be defeated.

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content safe place

Contented Little Hermit Crab

From openverse – hermit crab

My QEC practitioner did a podcast for our group about being a contented little hermit, exploring how for most of us the more we QEC the more we enjoy being on our own. Yes we still like people. We still like to connect but it doesn’t rule our lives.

Anyway this got me thinking about shells.

How often as a quiet, maybe shy, maybe introverted, maybe a deep thinker, were you told how pleased everyone was when you “came out of your shell” as though being in your shell was a bad thing?

Why is it a bad thing? No one would tell this hermit crab or any other shellfish to “come out of its shell”. That’s is home, its safe place.

We had visitors this week and at times there were things that I found hard work in the conversations. I found that I am now in the habit of ANSing myself [calming my autonomic nervous system and staying in regulation and balance] rather than reacting. But I also realised that I was no longer biting my tongue so I didn’t say anything. I was going into my shell, my safe place.

Inside my safe place I could be quiet, let the conversation flow around me, not have any desire to react to what was being said. I had space to breathe, to really listen to what was not being said too – the energy, so that when I did respond it was, on the whole, light, breezy and safe.

So for anyone who is getting a hard time about not “coming out of their shell” often enough ignore those people. They are jealous that you have a safe place to be to view the world when they aren’t brave enough to slide inside their shell.

Our shells are our safe places, are places to catch breath, are place to connect with ourselves and with God, which is where we should be on a regular basis.

Go on! Be bold and connect with your inner contented little hermit crab.

https://giphy.com/embed/xUA7bh63SnoXTl66Na

via GIPHY

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content

Content Right Where You Are

Small dog at the top of a mountain content right where he is. Above Loch Katrine September 2024 photographed by myself

How often do we wish we were somewhere else? Ok when things are really rubbish that is ok but how often do we do it when say we’re in a beautiful place but it isn’t quite where we wanted to be so we wish we were somewhere else? We’re on our walk with God and they’ve got us in the valley when we’d like to be on the mountain top. Ok we often rationalise that into a “this is God’s plan so I’ll go with it” but really we’re not happy.

I’ve spent years chasing after something else, wish I was this big person in Christian mission stuff, chasing after it and it not happening, trying to rationalise it into being “God’s will” or pushing against it because it could be “of the devil” why I don’t get on.

The other day I was reading this is in Beth’s blog

‘not every lake dreams to be an ocean.’ –

memet murat ildan

And I realised that even though I had dreamed of being an ocean in fact I was really a lake and could be content being a lake. Like I can be content walking on the lakeside rather than climbing the mountain, content to have the dysfunctional family but surrounded by inspiring friends.

The Apostle Paul tells us to be content in all circumstances [Philippians 4:11-13] and I think, too often we take that as good times and bad times, hearing preaching on how these things are transient, changeable, and that we can endure because we will pass through them. But, for me, I’m coming to realise that some things will not change. I cannot change my family or that I’ve never done some of the things I’ve done, that I will always be a lake and not an ocean. But I can change how I see things. I can be content to be a lake, to have lived the stories I have, to have had to walk on the lakeside rather than climb the mountain, to have missed out on things, to have at times be really uncontent and angry at how things were. I cannot go back and change but I can now change how I feel about those situations.

So I can be content in all things past, present and future knowing always that so much I cannot change but I can change how I feel about things, how I view things.